CoMP (Coordinated Multi-point Transmission/reception, coordinated multi-point transmission/reception) is one of key technologies of LTE-A (Long Term Evolution-Advanced, Long Term Evolution-Advanced), and is used to expand high data rate coverage, increase the average system throughput, and improve the performance for cell edge users.
The CoMP technology is a technology in which a UE (User Equipment, user equipment) can simultaneously receive signals from a serving cell and a coordination cell or a UE send signals to a serving cell and a coordination cell, which is equivalent to increasing a quantity of antennas of a transmit end or a receive end, so as to improve the communication performance by inputting and outputting signals through a plurality of paths.
The key to implementing coordinated multi-point transmission/reception lies in selection of a coordination cell, that is, selection of a CoMP coordination set of a UE.
In the prior art, a CoMP coordination set may be determined according to a difference between a strength value of a signal of a serving cell received by a user in the serving cell and a strength value of a signal of another cell except the serving cell received by the user or a difference between a path loss from a user in a serving cell to the serving cell and a path loss from the user to another cell except the serving cell. Specifically, the determining a CoMP coordination set according a difference between a strength value of a signal of a serving cell received by a user in the serving cell and a strength value of a signal of another cell except the serving cell received by the user is described. Referring to FIG. 1, three neighboring cells Sector 0, Sector 1, and Sector 2 are included. If the cells Sector 0, Sector 1, and Sector 2 include users UE0, UE1, and UE2, respectively. Sector 0 obtains strength of a signal of Sector 0 received by UE0 and strength of signals of Sector 1 and Sector 2 received by UE0. Assuming that a difference between the strength of the signal received from Sector 0 and the strength of the signal received from Sector 1 is smaller than a preset threshold, there is a high possibility that UE0 is located in a boundary area of Sector 0, and the cell Sector 0 performs coordinated multi-point transmission/reception for UE0; therefore, it can be determined that UE0 is a CoMP user of Sector 0, and it can be determined that Sector 1 is a coordination cell of UE0 and is used for performing coordinated multi-point transmission/reception for UE0. Assuming that a difference between the strength of the signal received from Sector 0 and the strength of the signal received from Sector 2 is greater than the preset threshold, the neighboring cell Sector 2 may not be preliminarily selected as a coordination cell of UE0. Therefore, in this scenario, a CoMP coordination set of UE0 includes the coordination cell Sector 1. Correspondingly, Sector 1 and Sector 2 also use the same method to determine CoMP users within respective coverage areas and CoMP coordination sets of the CoMP users.
Therefore, a user performing CoMP in a serving cell is referred to as a CoMP user in the serving cell.
However, in the prior art, it is determined, only based on the consideration of signal enhancement, that a cell causing great interference to a CoMP user is a coordination cell of the CoMP user. In such a selection manner, a factor of interference is not taken into consideration. In practice, interference of a serving cell is generally greatly different from interference of another cell; therefore, a user and a coordination set that are selected according to a difference between strength values of signals of the serving cell and another cell are generally not a user and a coordination set which help achieve a great gain during CoMP, which reduces the effect of CoMP.